ST. HILDAS SNAKE-STONES. 101 



lumps of cork. This did not look very promising, 

 but I held my peace, and waited and observed. 

 One after another of the old man's curiosities was 

 pointed out to me, and among them were shown 

 with great gusto a number of "petrified snakes," 

 as he called them. I had already made the 

 discovery that the old man was more of an artist 

 than a naturalist, and was quite impressed with 

 the taste and accuracy of some of the heads cast 

 in clay which here and there lay about, and which 

 he had moulded with his own hands. I suspected 

 at once, therefore, what his petrified snakes would 

 turn out to be, and so did not pitch my hopes 

 very high. When we came to them, I found, as 

 I had already surmised would be the case, that 

 his fossil snakes were Ammonites, whose curled 

 shells are so suggestive of a coiled snake. To 

 complete the delusion, and to evince the old man's 

 belief that they really were vipers in stone, he 

 had affixed to the end of the coil a snake's head 

 of clay. It required a good deal of talk to convince 

 the old gentleman that the objects were not snake- 

 stones, but merely the shells of creatures very 

 similar to the recent Nautilus. It was at Whitby 

 where this notion first took its rise, and for ages 

 it was held as an undoubted fact that St. Hilda 

 had transformed all the snakes into stone. Sir 

 Walter Scott, in his Marmion has given poetical 

 form to this old legend in lines that are familiar 

 enough to most geologists, and to many visitors 

 to romantic Whitby. I quoted them to the old 

 man : 



